"Historic Building Dimensions" Topic

May sound like an odd question but is there any concise source of what kind of size of the 'average' house/farm buildings of the period were.

We are all familiar with maps showing the 'Brown House' the 'Smith House' etc dotted all over the place but I for one have no idea how big or small these properties were in relation to their surroundings.

I'm keen to put some local discussion on relative building size and unit frontages to rest and of course 28mm miniatures and wargames models are of no use in the arguments due to the incompatibility of ground scale v vertical scale that we work with.

Any ideas?

Go to the library of congress web site. If you search the on line catalog for. "Drawing: va0866". You will get the survey prints of the stone house at Manassas.

This includes the property size and house dimensions.

Matthew

If you know an historical area where the original houses are still standing you can zoom in on them using google Earth and get exact dimensions.

From the few I have seen, take a typical McMansion of today and that is the size of a real Mansion from the 1860 and before time frame.

Finally, nearby here is Batsto village and the Somers Mansion, from the revolutionary war period – the Batsto main house and the Somers' mansion are roughly the same size (modern house footprint) and the workers huts around the Batsto house are less then 10 by 10 feet.

You might also try the Historic American Buildings Survey link

I don't know whereyou live, but there are several "recreated" villages where historic houses have been moved to one location. Bethpage Village in Long Island and Genesee Village in way upstate New York are examples. Both are worth the visit and you will get the idea of typical houses of the period. Just remember, most people lived in pretty small dwellings.

They came in a variety of sizes. Consider the little house that was Meade's HQ at Gettysburg. Then consider the Chancellor house at Chancellorsville.

The best single source for information on average or "vernacular" architecture in North America is Allen Noble, Wood Brick & Stone: The North American Settlement Landscape, Volume I: Houses (1984). Noble examines the different patterns of historical houses in the various regions of North America. The house most common to the middle-class in the south-east US is what is termed the I-house.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-house

Noble states that the average size ranged from "16 to 24 feet deep by 28 to 48 feet wide by 20 to 24 feet tall."
Poorer housing was commonly the "log pen house". In its most simple form this was a square log house usually measuring 16 to 17 feet on each side. The 16 1/2 foot measurement or Rod was historically a standard dimension common in both building and land measurement.

The single pen house could be expanded by adding another log pen, either attached to the first pen in a double pen house or separated by a roofed-over space of 8 to 12 feet to make a dog-trot house.

Other vernacular patterns were much more localized. For example, Pennsylvania (think Gettysburg) had a different tradition of housing patterns, which means a good number of gaming terrain modeled on Gettysburg architecture is only accurate for this particular campaign. Likewise, houses in the lower Mississippi Valley (Vicksburg) showed a measure of French influences not found elsewhere in the South.

Ryan,

That sounds the kind of thing I was after.

Of course I know its a kind of 'how long is a piece of string' question to begin with but what I was looking for is the kind of run of the mill rural/farming community where most of the battles were fought. Not Plantations or the high income end of the market, just the common wood frame or half timber/half brick place you might find anywhere.

Don't forget that each house would have an associated footprint of outbuildings and fences, especially those on farmsteads.

These could include such buildings as the barn, granary or corn crib, chicken coop, smoke house, spring house and privy. Any gardens would also be fenced in to protect against animals. All these structures would combine to create a distinct obstacle to both movement and fire.

Based on a quick Google Earth visit to three historical farms (Kelley Farm MN, The Homeplace TN, Horne Creek Farm NC) the average size of a antebellum farmstead is a polygon about 150 yards across.

Ryan Toews (post above) has nailed the characteristic of rural agricultural farms. You might also add pig pens (strong on the bottom but not too high), a strong tall small fenced area to contain a bull (many rural deaths of farmers were from bulls, cows need to be freshened every other year), kitchens for cooking (which were seperated from the house due to cooking smells and fire hazard), housing for laborers, sheds for woodworking and smithing, storing firewood and seasoning lumber and stables for wagons and horses. If there were any special small scale industries (spinning, weaving, sogrum cooking down, butter making, salt or lime extraction, milling, ) there would be extra buildings.

Most of the auxillary buildings would be crudely built, multiple use, and of limited lifetime. Few of these survived very long and often went out of use and were forgotten. You will not see them in modern reproductions of old farms. But they would be there during the ACW and offer cover and impede movement to a small extent. Buildings could be stripped to aide hasty field works. **

**(I'm impressed by a period picture of a quick defensive work around Atlanta. The soliders poked a few posts into the ground in rows about 18" apart and lined the outside with planks and boards torn off of a building. They filled the inside with dirt to form a 3' high wall that would stop most musketballs.)

Big differences between different areas, as well: Pennsylvania Dutch, Southern plantations, Shenandoah yeoman farm, urban (including small town) dwellings, po' white log cabin, etc.